1. Technical Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a computer software program for an improved document management system.
The basic function of document management software is to manage a document's lifetime from creation to destruction and at least give someone an even chance of locating the document by being able to search on more than an eight-dot-three pseudonym for the document.
Conversely, enterprise document management software was designed to solve the problems of large organizations with thousands of networked computers. This type of software was designed to securely and dependably manage every electronic document produced within the enterprise and reliably retrieve those documents wherever, and whenever, required.
Enterprise document management software typically has the following components: A database, a browser interface, a search interface, and a method of intercepting file save and open calls.
The database is used to store information about a document other than its file name. Information such as the author, the typist, the date of creation and notes are typical fields, however, most importantly, are the database controls where the file is stored and the access to that location. The database record contains a pointer to the file system saying “find this file.” It also generally contains information as to which application should be launched to edit the document, such as MICROSOFT WORD or MICROSOFT EXCEL (trademarks of the Microsoft Corporation.)
The database is, in effect, a Connection Manager.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Many enterprise document management systems provide an interface whereby users can browse, in some logical fashion, through the documents available to them.
All enterprise document management systems provide some form of search ability with respect to the fields recorded in the database. The responsiveness of the search is entirely dependent on the database chosen for the back-end.
Some of these systems also offer full text searching of the contents of the electronic documents themselves.
Many of the enterprise document management systems are able to enforce proper profiling and storage documents by intercepting calls made by the document production software to the file system. There are two ways in which this can be achieved. One is to use macros to alter behavior of the production application, or interfere, with the low level operating system code used by the network to properly manage the file system. The macro method usually involves the launch of a part of the document management system in response to a “file save” or “open” command. Most systems, therefore, require that their software be continuously running in the background in order to respond to these calls, this, however, can have dramatic effects on the operator's system performance. As there is only so much RAM to share between applications, the more that can be made available for production applications, the better.
The problem with many of the enterprise document management systems, which are essentially targeted at the large corporate market, is that, apart from being expensive software, they do not cater to small- to medium-sized organizations.
Since the first enterprise development systems became available, Network Operating Systems (NOS) have been quietly maturing in the background. Modem NOS's, such as MICROSOFT NT4 SERVER (trademark of Microsoft Corporation for a network operating system) have been built in object (document) level security, replication and file system databases, such as MICROSOFT EXCHANGE (trademark of Microsoft Corporation), eliminating the need to rebuild these things as expensive add-ins.
NOS's have matured to the point where much of what a document management system does is already built into the NOS or tightly integrated components, such as, MICROSOFT EXCHANGE and MICROSOFT OFFICE (both trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.)